


Burn

by parabolica (orphan_account)



Category: Desperate Romantics
Genre: Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 14:45:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10515858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/parabolica
Summary: Fred has no wish to be sensible. Tonight he wants to be a muse.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/gifts).



“I must have a model!”

Fred flinches back from the table as Gabriel’s fist descends. The thump isn’t loud enough to register above the noise of the tavern, sailors singing a shanty in the corner, the whores giggling as they sway from one man to the next in search of coin, a game of dice and a half-dozen arguments in progress, the slop of ale in tankards and the clatter of cheap cutlery on tin plates. Even so, the thump disturbs the contents of their table, making the laudanum bottle jump and the stale crust of what the barmaid swore was yesterday’s bread rattle on the plate.

“The muse demands it.” Gabriel pushes both hands through riotous black curls and clenches tight. His face distorts into a mask, the expression of a man in pain. “ _Demands_ , damn it!” He pulls at his hair and drops his head, the picture of despair.

Fred moistens his lips and glances around the tavern. Dark, squalid, stinking of sour beer, fresh piss, and cheap tobacco, it’s a far cry from his parents’ comfortable home, a place of chintz and porcelain and muted colour, a place where agreeable, undemanding paintings hang on the wall beside mounted silhouettes of grandparents and great-grandparents.

This is real life. This tavern, this man opposite him. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are the only things that matter. Lizzie, too, matters—she is an object of fascination and wonder, of great beauty and sweetness, perhaps the love of his life—but he found her on behalf of the Brotherhood and because of the Brotherhood, and sometimes he wonders if he loves her or her image; if he loves the woman—a shop girl, when all’s said and done, a female below his class no matter what her father’s pretensions decree—or if he loves the potential of her.

Perhaps, he thinks, he is Pygmalion and she Galatea. But he is no artist; simply a proxy. And a proxy must offer himself, or be forgotten.

“What manner of painting do you have in mind?”

Gabriel stares at him, gaze like black fire. “I had not thought— But I think— Ah, yes. The subject will come to me when I put pencil to paper.” A spasm crosses his face. “I am not beholden to a single idea, like Maniac. One word from Ruskin and he pursues the theme of the fallen woman like a dog after a bitch. I will not be so constrained. I tell you, Fred,” he props an elbow on the table and leans close, wagging one finger, “I have masterpieces inside me. Hundreds of them. They wait but for the right moment, the right model, and then...” he gestures, fingers spreading wide, and flings himself back, “boom! They explode.”

Fred nods. He knows the feeling well. Often he sits at his window, virgin paper spread on his desk before him, pen and ink at the ready, and he waits for the swirl of phrases and images in his mind to alight, to transfer themselves in a process of alchemy to the paper in the form of poems or elegant prose.

But he is a newspaperman, and his words remain rigid and fixed.

He draws in a breath. “I would model for you.” His bravery trips him, makes him stumble. “If you would like, that is, if you believe I would fit the—the theme of your painting—I would very much like to be involved...”

He’s blushing as fiery-red as Lizzie’s tresses, but the colour recedes as quickly as the dye washing from Annie’s hair when he realises Gabriel is staring at him. Unblinking, a basilisk’s stare, and beneath the intensity Fred feels drained, or stripped, or flayed down to the bone.

He’s longed for Gabriel to look at him like this. To see him not just as a hanger-on, a sad little satellite orbiting the Brotherhood, but as flesh and blood and nature.

Abruptly, Gabriel snaps from his reverie. He sits up straight and scans the crowded tavern. “I couldn’t pay you.”

Joy beats a frantic tattoo in Fred’s breast. He tries to remain cool, diffident, as if the offer had been casually made. “Of course. I understand. I’m not a true model, after all. Not a professional. Just an amateur.”

Gabriel flashes a grin. “I’ll make you look professional, don’t you worry.”

Fred isn’t worried about that. Rather he should be concerned with how he’s going to explain to his parents this sudden leap from reporter to model. How he’ll explain to his colleagues, many of whom are rough types unable to appreciate true art. There’ll be mockery and bewilderment, possibly worse. But it would be worth it. For one painting, he’ll be a muse.

Gabriel’s muse.

Excitement stirs inside him, swift and hot. Desire tangles around it. He will be immortalised. On paper, in charcoal; on canvas, in oils. Someone will buy him—his image—and hang him on the wall of their home. Perhaps he could even inspire the masterpiece that Gabriel needs to win recognition within the hallowed walls of the Royal Academy!

Fred’s heart quickens. He—his image—could bring Gabriel acceptance and fame; and then he—as himself—could write about it for the _Illustrated London News_.

His thoughts teem, loosed from sober control. He almost laughs. If the other members of the Brotherhood were here, they’d surely urge him to reconsider. Hunt would quote some Biblical verse against pride and vanity, and Johnny, wise in his naivety, would utter a remark so foolish as to bring a man to his senses.

But Fred has no wish to be sensible. Tonight he wishes to be a muse.

Gabriel stands. He reaches out a hand, and for a moment Fred thinks he’s reaching for _him_. Then Gabriel picks up the stale crust and bites into it, tearing at the hard bread with sharp white teeth, chewing and chewing until the thing is palatable. He grimaces, tucks the bottle of laudanum into his coat pocket, and swings himself around the table. “Come along, Fred.” He throws a laughing glance over his shoulder, black curls tumbling. “Pay the tab, would you? Afraid I’m a little short of tin.”

He saunters off, a spring in his step. He doesn’t look back.

Restraining a sigh, Fred digs a hand in his pocket and slaps a few coins onto the table. As he leaves the tavern, his attention snags on a thin blonde whore perched upon the lap of a sailor. She gives him a knowing look.

Fred averts his gaze and hurries on.

*

One summer, when he was a boy, his parents had paid for an art tutor. Fred thinks of that long-distant time now as Gabriel leans against the door of the greenhouse and jiggles the lock. Night folds around them in a wash of black. The stars are invisible, wrapped in a cloud noxious and manmade. The smell of cold earth rises to greet him, and then with a curse of triumph Gabriel opens the door and other odours rush out, turpentine and oils and musk and the strange heathen scent of grape-must.

Fred steps inside, wary of where he places his feet. Paper skitters and slides. Crumpled balls of the stuff, or pages torn from a sketchpad and discarded. He turns one sketch around with the toe of his shoe and peers down at it. Lines in pencil and charcoal, some thick and bold, others tentative and slender. Detail leaps out at him as Gabriel lights the lanterns, sets a flame to the candles. A woman in a medieval gown, long curling hair framing her face.

The face is blank. Fred shudders.

“It’s been a while since I painted a man.” Gabriel strolls over, sidestepping the mess with ease. He holds out a glass of liquid that might be clear if it did not hold the tones of candlelight within it. “Have I ever painted just a man? I can’t remember. Portraits don’t count. They’re nothing. No challenge. Allegories, on the other hand...”

“Thank you.” Fred takes the glass. Gabriel has a bottle of something. Not laudanum, it’s a different shape, a different colour. The label has peeled off. Fred hopes it’s not anything too potent. He doesn’t have a head for spirits. Girding himself, he tosses back the contents of the glass.

It’s like fire, warm at first and then burning. Tears spring to his eyes. He gasps.

Gabriel chuckles and fills the glass again, then swigs from the bottle.

Gin, Fred thinks, rotgut stuff. It’s taken the tang of coal smoke from the back of his throat and left an ache in its place. He sips at the second glass, but the taste is so foul it’s better to drink it down in one. He wipes at his watering eyes and blinks around the greenhouse.

Candle stubs in little glass lanterns hang from the slanting roof. A cluster of flames shines brightly from a table. A lamp casts a glow over the couch, transforming it from a broken-backed thing covered in a moth-eaten shawl to a sumptuous divan. Fred turns slowly, the alcohol making its way through him. He smiles, rapt, transfixed by the lights. Like stars, like constellations, with Gabriel at the centre.

“My art master told me that one couldn’t draw in a place with inadequate lighting.”

Gabriel kneels beside a portable stove. “You had an art master?”

“When I was a boy. Yes.” The gin has a softening effect. Fred pours himself another with a dreamy smile.

The stove hasn’t been cleaned out after its last use. Ash clings to Gabriel’s hands. He shoves a mix of coal and wood and old sketches inside then sets a candle to the lot. The paper ignites, fire chewing through the pencil lines. Gabriel slams the door shut and drops the catch. “Who was he?”

Fred loosens his neckcloth and leans against a bench. The smell of loam is stronger here. When he looks around—carefully, so as not to encourage the dizziness swimming through his senses—he sees trays full of withered seedlings and a stack of notebooks written in a crabbed hand.

He turns away. “I don’t know. He seemed to me someone of great importance, but children often mistake self-importance for genuine talent.”

Gabriel wipes his hands on his coat then shrugs out of it, tossing the garment over a chair. He smiles, but says nothing.

“He’d shown at the Academy. I remember that much.” Fred struggles to recall the memory of attending the exhibition with his tutor. They’d passed all the paintings he’d most wanted to see until they stood before a still life, the accompanying label bearing his tutor’s name in copperplate. “Floral,” he says, remembering pink and white in a vase of blue and white. “Roses. Carnations. Chrysanthemums?”

“How perfectly horrid.”

“It was,” Fred agrees, floating on a reminiscence of rose petals, silk-soft, fragile, the colours smudging and blurring. “At the end of the summer, he told me I possessed not a scrap of artistic talent. Or rather, he told my parents, for they were the ones paying him. It was my mother who told me my dreams were at an end.”

Gabriel laughs. “Only madmen want to be artists. For those of us who _are_ artists, it’s a curse.”

“I think it must be wonderful.” A bubble of gin pops in Fred’s throat. It tastes sour, like jealousy, but there is something beneath the distillation, something more than sloes. He frowns at the empty glass in his hand. “What was in that drink?”

“Gin,” Gabriel says. He catches up a sketchbook and turns to a fresh page, rooting through a box of pencils and charcoal sticks until he finds one still sharpened to a point. He drops onto a chair and swings it back onto two legs, rocking to and fro as he considers the paper, considers Fred, considers the paper again. “With a drop of laudanum. More than a drop, actually.”

Aware that he’s modelling now, Fred puts down the glass and ventures to the middle of the room. To his left, in the shadowed corner, he can see Gabriel’s bed. The sheets are twisted, frothing like sea foam upon a strand. The counterpane slithers, satin patchwork the colour of beetles, green and blue and black combining.

His tongue feels heavy. It’s hard to focus. “Why?”

Gabriel jumps from his chair, letting it fall behind him in emphasis. He flings down the sketchpad and tears at his cravat, hurling the patterned silk across the studio as if his emotion cannot be contained but must be expressed in the most flamboyant of gestures. He raises his hands to heaven, knocking one of the hanging lanterns. The candle gutters, light spiralling in mad flashes, like genius.

“Because in order to paint you, I need to see you. _You_ , Fred. As you truly are.” He advances, brandishing the stick of charcoal. “Not the reporter, prim and longing to be shocked out of your staid existence. Not the man who believes himself in love with propriety, a slave to the shackles of sensible society. I want the real man, the Fred who lives beneath the surface, the Fred who yearns for more...”

Anguish flutters, a painful sweetness. Fred trembles with the force of it. “I do. I am that man. I can be what you need.”

“I know.” Gabriel clutches at him—arms, shoulders. “I know you can.” His hands frame Fred’s face, squeezing tight, angling Fred’s head. For an insane moment, Fred thinks Gabriel will kiss him. He stares up into fire-black eyes, mouth open to gasp in air. Gabriel looks and looks, not searching but seeing nonetheless. Then he lets go, so fast that Fred staggers.

“Accolon.” He whirls away, holding the charcoal aloft. “That’s who you’ll be. Accolon.”

Fred’s legs feel like aspic. He touches his face where Gabriel’s hand branded him, and his fingers come away smeared with black. He has charcoal on his cheek, in his hair. It should matter, but it doesn’t. He pours himself another drink, gin and laudanum and pride. Through hazy vision he watches Gabriel stride about, retrieving the sketchpad, righting the chair, arranging the lamp for greater illumination.

“Stand here,” Gabriel instructs, pointing to a spot on the floor. “Hands together, as if gripping something. Yes, like that. Now look towards the wall.” He adjusts Fred’s posture, moving him with as much care as a child arranges a ragdoll. His eyes gleam, and a smile threatens his serious mien: inspiration is riding him, making its demands. “I have no costume appropriate to this study. Instead we must imagine it. I must imagine it.”

Fred is pliant, more so than usual with the alcohol and the opium hushing through his body. He is willing to be turned, manipulated, stroked into position. A flush heats his cheeks; a delicious languor spreads its taproots. Gabriel continues talking, but the words fade in and out of Fred’s consciousness. If this is drunkenness, it is a most pleasant sensation. Fred smiles, humming at the stars in the glass lanterns. The heat strobing from the stove prickles his skin, but it is Gabriel who scorches him.

“Acheron,” he says, rolling the word from his tongue. It doesn’t quite match the sound Gabriel made, but he knows what Acheron is. “One of the rivers of the Underworld.”

Gabriel barely glances up. The scratch-soft-slide of charcoal on paper. Motion fast, deliberate. An idea growing in execution. “Yes. Acheron. The river Charon rowed across with his boatload of souls.”

“River of sorrow.” Fred wrinkles his nose. His hands feel like lead. His limbs seem to be growing. The stove crouches on the floor and growls, belching puffs of heat. The stars in the lanterns swing and the vines writhe against the glass panes. “River of cleansing.”

Cleansing is better than sorrow. That’s why he’s here, is it not? To be cleansed of his sorrow. The agent of both is in front of him, capturing his likeness, fixing him in a firmament. Fred will become a star within the constellation of the Brotherhood.

“We are all rivers of the Underworld,” he decides, and the idea makes him laugh. It’s delicious, really it is. “Let’s see, can I remember? Of course—Lethe, river of Forgetfulness. That must be Johnny. Always forgetting, is Johnny. Or else, never really getting it in the first place. How can a man be so innocent in person yet so knowing in his art? Then there’s Cocytus, the river of Wailing. Oh, that must be Maniac. Woe, woe, the thump of religion, sackcloth and ashes...”

Gabriel tears off the sheet of paper, crumples it and casts it to the floor, then begins afresh. This time his attention is on Fred, black gaze unwavering as his hand moves across the page. “And I? Which river am I? The Styx?”

Fred considers, swaying slightly as gin and laudanum bump through his veins. “No, no. You cannot be the Styx. It’s too well-known. And besides, it is the river of Hatred, and... No, the Styx is Art itself, surrounding the Brotherhood seven times. You, my dear Gabriel,” he extends a finger, pointing at the figure that splits into two, then three, then becomes one again, “you are the Phlegethon. River of Fire. You burn people, Gabriel. You light them, and they _burn_.”

Gabriel smiles, but makes no response.

“Lizzie,” Fred blurts, and Gabriel’s smile fades. “I came here once. At night. I don’t know why. To see— To see her, or to see you, I no longer recall. I saw you both, upon that bed.” He gestures, almost overturns himself. His knees buckle; the studio swims around him. His voice sounds hollow. The walls of the house are breathing. The stove has eyes where its mouth should be.

“She means nothing.” Gabriel lays aside the finished sketch and begins another. “And everything,” he adds, before Fred can take umbrage. “Art is a mistress both fickle and constant. You must know that, as a failed artist yourself.”

The jibe is no more than the truth, yet it feels crueller than anything Fred has experienced. He lifts a hand as if to deflect the blow. Thrilled by the pose, Gabriel exclaims and bends over his sketchpad, charcoal whipping black across the white.

“She means everything to me,” Fred cries, and his face is no longer his own; it’s contorted, and his eyes leak tears, but as they rain into his mouth he tastes gin rather than salt. The stove pulses heat, waves building to swamp him. He rips at his neckcloth, discards his coat, plucks at the buttons on his waistcoat, too hot, too lost, too full of desire and hatred and grief and want.

Gabriel looks at him. “She means everything to you only because she means everything to me.”

Fred puts a hand to his hair. He clutches tight, gripping hard enough to hurt, but it doesn’t override the pressure in his chest or the pain in his heart.

The night encroaches, crawling, scrawling. Sweat streams down his face as cold creeps over the panes of glass. Was this how Lizzie felt, Ophelia in the bathtub, the candles winking out one by one? Is this how it ends, this slow slide into drowning?

The vine twists, tortured. The eyes of the stuffed armadillo glisten. On the bench, a skull, an egg, a length of red twine; artefacts obscure and obscene. Dizziness impales Fred and spreads him out, scattering him to the heavens. Time expands, outwards and upwards forever and ever—

“Fred.”

Gabriel’s voice, black as pitch, black like his eyes, like his soul. Smiling, he takes Fred by the arms. He touches Fred’s brow. Cold sweat, but the skin is so hot.

Fred gasps. “I burn.”

“I know.” Gabriel’s expression is odd, almost pitying, and then it is obliterated by lust.

*

He wakes alone. The pounding on the door mimics the pounding in his head. Fred stirs within sheets damp with the smell of spilled seed, and groans. The knocking continues. A figure beyond the steamed glass, a figure now intent on jiggling the lock.

He scarcely has time to sit up—a mistake, for the weak sun rubs holes through the glasshouse and digs into his eyes—before Johnny comes in.

“Such news!” Johnny cries, carried along by exuberance, and then he falters, confused by the tableau before him. His brow wrinkles, his mouth parts. He is too innocent to realise what it means that Fred’s clothes are strewn about the floor, that Fred is in Gabriel’s bed. “Fred? What are you doing here?”

The smell of sex mingles with the odour of greenery and mustiness. He can’t meet Johnny’s enquiring gaze. “I was modelling.”

“Ah.” Apparently mollified by the simple explanation, Johnny stoops to pick up the sketches that litter the studio. He arranges them into some sort of order and browses through them in thoughtful silence.

Fred moves from the bed, wincing at the pattern of bruises on his hips and the ache in his fundament. His thighs are stained and the sheets are lousy beneath him, yet still he feels triumphant.

Johnny glances up from the sketches and blushes. Now, it seems, Johnny has realised the depravity to which Fred had sunk last night, but has not the words to address it. Strange for an artist to be so shy, but then, Fred is an artist, too—or at least an artist’s model—and his face is burning.

He busies his hands with buttoning his waistcoat and tying his neckcloth, inching closer to the sheaf of pictures. He glimpses them at angles, and then Johnny turns to present them one by one. What he sees confuses him. A knight, armour suggested but not detailed, standing amidst daffodils and monkshood, holding a sword. A frame of hawthorn encloses the image. His features are Fred’s features, drawn with bold strokes. The sword, too, is finely wrought, a thing of beauty.

“That—” Fred’s voice rusts in his throat. “Not Acheron.”

Johnny blinks at him. “Acheron? No, this is Accolon. From the _Morte d’Arthur_. You know, Arthur’s rival.”

Blood thumps at his temples. “Rival.”

“Yes.” Johnny lacks Hunt’s gift of exposition, but does his best. “Accolon was loved by Morgan le Fay. One day, when Arthur and Accolon were hunting, she cast them both into a deep sleep. When Accolon awoke, she gave him Excalibur and told him to kill the next knight he met. Of course, the next knight was Arthur in disguise, and Arthur thought he had Excalibur, until he started to lose the battle. It seemed Accolon would triumph, then the Lady of the Lake appeared and Excalibur was restored to its true owner, and Arthur dealt Accolon a savage blow, one from which the knight never recovered.”

Silence rings around the glasshouse. Condensation drips.

“I see,” Fred says.

“Do you?” The look Johnny gives him is quizzical, clear-eyed. He pulls himself together with a quick smile. “Well. I wanted to tell Gabriel... But never mind. I suppose I’ll catch up with him later.”

“Yes. I suppose you will.”

Johnny seems nervous now, his movements quick and birdlike. Or maybe he is simply anxious to leave this place of sin and shattered dreams. “And you. I suppose we’ll see you, too.”

Fred’s head aches. “I imagine so.”

The exchange at an awkward end, Johnny retreats, wedging the door shut.

Fred watches him blur into the mist clouding the windows, then gathers the sketches together into a pile. Beside the stove, he kneels to scrape out the ashes.

It is the work of moments to rip the sketches into two, into three, into myriad pieces. It is simplicity itself to feed the stove and light a fire and watch himself burn.


End file.
